RE: RCR for Instant Runoff Voting

Yes, this is an early-stages thing. I didn’t do anything with the summary screen. You can consider this a bug, rather than a new feature.

Truth is I hadn’t even thought of the idea to sort the ranks in the summary screen, which is a neat way to do this. I had thought about showing the candidates in rotated order (like it currently does) with the rank beside the name. Drawing the numbers was a fair amount of work, and I just skipped it.

For those playing along, we will have a demonstrable PR/IR voting system in the 4.4 release of ballot station. Steve and Frank ran an early demo of the system in Santa Clara last week. Note that there is currently no back end (GEMS) for IR/PR, so the system is just a demo at this point.

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-rcr@gesn.com [mailto:owner-rcr@gesn.com] On Behalf Of Steve Knecht
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 9:41 PM
To: rcr@dieboldes.com
Subject: RCR for Instant Runoff Voting

Ken,

I know we are in the early stages. One good critique came from the first person who used the IR in Santa Clara. They kept going back and forth from the Summary to the voted screen and changing their votes. I noticed and went over and asked them why. They said they were trying to tell if the Summary page was sorting per their order since the number order of the candidate was not listed on the summary page. They were right. There was no way to tell from the summary page if the proper ranking was being given to their candidates, only that the candidates they selected were listed. Could a sort or number be shown to help the voter out with their confirmation?

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Clark [mailto:ken@dieboldes.com]
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 5:10 PM
To: 'Frank Kaplan'
Cc: 'Robert Chen'; greenp@diebold.com; skglobal@earthlink.com
Subject: RE: Instant Runoff Voting

Thanks. For what it is worth, the navigation buttons are in the works. I just talked to Steve about it briefly. Some of the requests are part of Radke’s R7 marketing specification, and some have already been implemented by Ataa for the next major ballot station release (4.4). The most important being the ability to return to the instruction screen, which is a serious current shortcoming.

It is interesting (concerning) that everyone already had IR. Did you get any impression of whose were “real”, or does everyone (except us) have a production IR voting system for touch screen?

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Kaplan [mailto:fkglobal@earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 4:54 PM
To: Ken Clark
Cc: 'Robert Chen'; greenp@diebold.com
Subject: RE: Instant Runoff Voting

The demo with the IR ballot went fine. It was attended by about 100-150 people from various community groups in Santa Clara over a 2 1/2 day period. We were side/side/side with ES&S and Sequoia. The IR was a wash since all had it. We did get some interesting feedback re features: ability to return to instructions; ability to go back and forth from English to another language; ability to return directly to Summary Page; etc. Apparently our competitors have all these type features. Our VIBS did not demo as well as our competitors. We'll write something up when we have time.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Clark [mailto:ken@dieboldes.com]
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 5:22 PM
To: fkglobal@earthlink.net
Cc: 'Robert Chen'; greenp@diebold.com
Subject: RE: Instant Runoff Voting

Frank, how did the demo go last week? Who was in attendance? Robert, can you please send me a copy of the database used for the demo for my own posterity.

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Kaplan [mailto:fkglobal@earthlink.net]
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 1:45 PM
To: Ken Clark
Subject: RE: Instant Runoff Voting

Robert has put something together for the demo. I haven't seen it as yet.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Clark [mailto:ken@dieboldes.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 2:34 PM
To: fkglobal@earthlink.com
Cc: 'Green, Pat'; whitman@dieboldes.com
Subject: RE: Instant Runoff Voting

Frank, what is the status of the demonstration you need to run on the 15^th to the 17^th.

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Clark [mailto:ken@dieboldes.com]
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2002 9:59 PM
To: 'fkglobal@earthlink.com'
Cc: 'Green, Pat'; 'whitman@dieboldes.com'
Subject: RE: Instant Runoff Voting

Frank, I have completed enough of “proportional voting” to be sufficient to run a demo. You touch the screen, it puts nice numbers on the screen. It should also be able to upload the proportional votes to GEMS and display the numbers in the “view ballots dialog”. That part knocked ‘em dead in Ireland when we showed it. I have asked Whitman to nurse this while I am away and fix any bugs. I can also do some 11^th hour work when I get back on the 12^th if necessary.

What it doesn’t do is any backend processing. It just adds up all the choices and reports that as the total. In other words, there is no “runoff”. It just records the preferences in order.

What is missing from all of this is a support person to put together a nice database for your demo. That support person is not Whitman. When we did the Ireland demo Mike Brown put together the database, for what it is worth. It does not take any special skills, but you’ll want someone who can put something attractive together for you. Once a support person has been assigned, Whitman can build and send a release for them.

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Kaplan [mailto:fkglobal@earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 5:31 PM
To: Patrick Green
Cc: Bob Urosevich; Barry Herron; Thomas W. Swidarski
Subject: Instant Runoff Voting

Pat,
The Santa Clara County RFP calls for Community Presentations on 8/15, 8/16,
8/17. These presentations include demonstration of Instant Runoff Voting on
the touch screen units.

Please advise on your plan for compliance with this requirement.
Thanks.
-Frank